Like so many others who found purchase in the world of food over the past 20 years, I was indebted to Powell for democratizing that world, for demystifying it, for showing that it could and perhaps should be breached by people who came to it not with a gastronome’s formal training and fancy vocabulary but with passion, with personality, with Tums.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. She also wrote, with her husband, more than twenty screenplays in order to make money. The couple was hardly alone: from the early days of Hollywood, literary figures like Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Brecht took a swing at the pictures. More recent efforts have come from Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and Martin Amis. There’s even a whole Coen brothers movie about serious writers slumming it in Tinseltown, replete with a William Faulkner stand-in. It’s an understandable trade-off, using commerce to fund art; sometimes Nobel Prize winners need day jobs too.
The motivations are less apparent when the situation is reversed.
All we’ve learned is that, yes, we all read the same book, but that some parts of the book resonated more with some people. Now if we want to know the why of what makes some people like some things and other people like other things, well … we can talk about it if we want, but on a fundamental level, does anyone care? We already know that different people respond to the same thing in different ways. Surely this isn’t why we started a book club.
After eating, there was more eating. The Peranakans would not stop feeding me, although I couldn’t tell if this was a peculiarly Peranakan trait or simply symptomatic of Singapore, where eating is the national pastime, along with its corollary, talking about eating. A friend of Wee’s, Serene Liok, 74, threw me a popiah party at her home near the Singapore Botanic Gardens — a party because popiah, fresh spring rolls, are so labor-intensive to make, you must share the bounty. The featherweight skins were kept damp under a wet cloth until called into service, rough side up on the plate, smeared with garlic and chile pastes, then topped with lettuce leaves, ribs broken the better to lie flat; a filling of jicama, bamboo shoots, pork belly, shrimp and tofu, drained in a colander so the skins wouldn’t get soggy; thin arcs of shrimp, darkly sweet lap cheong shards, bean sprouts, cucumber and strips of omelet and tofu that looked like they’d been run through a paper shredder (the fineness of the cutting testifies to the cook’s skill); sweet bean sauce, sticky enough to cling a little to the spoon; and fried garlic, fried flour, fried flatfish — all pulverized into a crunchy dust — plus, in the Liok family’s variation, seaweed, which startled another Peranakan there; chopped cilantro; then one more layer of filling before it was rolled up tight.
But with each meal, I wondered: Am I getting any closer to understanding what it means to be Peranakan? What is it that unites a people? That is, what makes them see themselves as a people? Is it the food they eat, the language they speak, the rituals they follow, the gods they revere — or is it more nebulous and more instinctual: a sense of kinship through collective experience?
But the Crunchwrap’s stronghold on Portland chefs isn’t just a play on fast food nostalgia and Instagram bait; its structure and format are objectively well-suited to a balanced, fun, creative dish. It’s portable with built-in textural contrast at its center. “When I made the fried chicken and queso cheese Crunchwrap at Bullard, I went on record saying it was the best thing I made in my life,” Bella says. “I think that’s where the humor comes from. It’s only a funny joke if it’s an incredible plate of food.”
So ghosts were an established fact of my life when I was growing up, maybe the only real religious certainty we inherited. My grandmother—also a churchgoing Christian—accepted their existence with the same serene passivity with which she did everything. My mother claims to have seen a few. I have not. I used to think I’d never see a ghost because I wanted it too much, as though the spirits of dead people behaved like an underwritten man from an early season of Sex and the City. I’d even lived after college in a converted brownstone that was widely considered to be haunted—former tenants had seen apparitions and my roommate had had unsettling experiences with slamming pocket doors and rogue electronics. I never felt anything at all. But my faith is solid.
Artist and author Shaun Tan creates semi-mechanical and animalesque beings that seem born of both the natural world and industrious humans. Whimsical, cerebral, socially aware, grotesque and cuddly, Tan's artistic universe runs the emotional gamut.
Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections is a comprehensive collection of Tan's artwork from the last 25 years as well as essays by Tan about his creative practice and lifelong fascination with creatures.
Cells build organisms from the ground up, and therefore to choose to write about them is to give oneself permission to explore almost any aspect of the living world. They are “a life within a life” as Siddhartha Mukherjee puts it in his latest book, which takes advantage of that licence to offer a comprehensive account of basic biology, alongside a history of the many great minds that have helped us to see beyond widespread misconceptions to scientific truth.